John Coltrane

John William Coltrane was born in Hamlet, North Carolina, on the twenty-third of September 1926. He took up the saxophone at fourteen, served briefly in the U.S. Navy band in Hawaii in 1945 and 1946, and entered the Philadelphia jazz scene in the late 1940s.

He played in the Dizzy Gillespie big band, in the Miles Davis Quintet of 1955 to 1957 ('Round About Midnight), and as a member of the Thelonious Monk Quartet in 1957. His addiction to heroin, which had cost him several positions and his marriage, ended in a religious experience in 1957 that he subsequently described as the foundation of his musical work. He never used heroin again.

He rejoined Miles Davis for Kind of Blue (1959) — the best-selling jazz album in history — and formed the classic John Coltrane Quartet (McCoy Tyner, Jimmy Garrison, Elvin Jones) in 1961. The Quartet recorded My Favorite Things (1961), Live at the Village Vanguard (1962), Crescent (1964), A Love Supreme (1964 — recorded in a single session, an extended four-part devotional offering that has remained the most-cited jazz album of the twentieth century outside Kind of Blue), and Ascension (1965).

His final period — 1965 to 1967 — explored a freer, more abstract form with a new quintet that included Pharoah Sanders and his wife Alice Coltrane on piano. The work of these years (Meditations, Interstellar Space) influenced every subsequent generation of jazz musicians and shaped the spiritual-jazz tradition that continues into the present.

He died of liver cancer on the seventeenth of July 1967, age forty.

He is honored here as the saxophonist whose four-part offering remains the central devotional work in American music.